Birthday Present

Tomorrow version 1.3 of TiltShift will be released. While it’s not exactly a major update, it took two months to get approved, due to a very strange problem that eventually came down to a bug in Xcode 4.6.

Even though the experience of getting through review was far from being perfect, I am very thankful that there are excellent and dedicated people at Apple that helped me in the end. Without those people I might have given up on the product by now, at least dumped the Mac App Store distribution model.

Most of all, my gratitude goes to the unknown engineer who solved the bug that was causing the archive build not to include the .xcent file.

Brief technical info only relevant for developers: Upon building, Xcode generates a file with the extension xcent compiled from the original entitlements file that you have included in the target. Main difference is that variables like you Team ID will be resolved during that process. The derived xcent file is being used when resigning from the Xcode Organizer that happens when uploading to iTunes Connect or exporting a developer ID signed app. In case that file is missing for some reason, your app will no longer have sandboxing enabled, which is exactly what I witnessed.

I take it as a birthday present that the update was approved last Friday.